Archive for the ‘procedural textures’ Category

I haven’t had nearly as much time to get stuff done at home as I’d like, as work has been a bit of a scramble recently. Working ridiculously hard at a code-related day job and then coming home and trying to code is…difficult. And recently, highly unsuccessful.

However, this last weekend I was able to get a few things done.

Silos Are Not Just For Grain and Missiles

First up, I decided to check out Nevercenter Silo, a 3D modeling program that I swear has to be the easiest-to-use modeling software I have ever SEEN. For some reason, this software just completely clicks with me.

Maybe it’s that it allows me to start with something as simple as a box and push/pull/extrude/warp/etc it slowly into the shape that I want, or maybe it’s that it has built-in support for symmetrical modeling (you basically model HALF of a model and the other half changes shape along with it). It’s hard to say. However, it feels more like sitting down with clay and slowly morphing it into the shape that I want vs. the usually-cumbersome task of modeling a 3D mesh.

Consequently, not terribly long after I got it, I modeled what will likely be the first ship for my new game!

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I used subdivision surfaces to do the modeling, so the source geometry (pictured to the left above) is actually rather simple. But when subdivided, it forms (what I think is) a pretty cool-looking spacecraft.

S.S. Procedural Is Leaving Port

I also managed to get my procedural content (textures, mostly) generation ported over to run on XNA (from C++, so it was a bit of work). Since I’m aiming to release this game as part of the XNA dealy on the 360 (with an option for XBLA if I’m really, really lucky), I’ve been taking great care in ensuring that it is going to run well on the Xbox 360. So far, so good. I have background asset generation working, etc etc.

So I put off working on this entry long enough that it’s now two entries worth of data in one.

Too Many Instructions: Cutting Down On the Noise

So, the implementation of Improved Perlin noise from GPU Gems 2 boils down to 48 pixel shader instruction slots (9 texture, 39 arithmetic). That’s one octave of noise. What I needed, desperately, was a faster implementation of noise, where the base quality doesn’t matter (especially useful for things such as fBm and the like).

In the FIRST GPU Gems, in the chapter on Improved Perlin Noise, Ken Perlin makes a quick note about how to make a cheap approximation of perlin noise in the shader, using a volume texture. The technique is straight forward, but it took me some effort to understand exactly what was supposed to go into the volume texture.

In my case, I ended up using a 32x32x32 volume texture to simulate an 8x8x8 looping sample of perlin noise space. Essentially, when sampling this texture, divide the world position by 8, and use that as the (wrapped) texcoord into the volume.

Crazy 8s: Modifying Perlin Noise To Loop At A Specified Location

The first trick is that it has to be LOOPING Perlin noise. But how do you generate such a thing?

So, really, the +1s are added to the coordinate added earlier.
So, to make the noise wrap at a certain value, you need to take those (coordinate+1)s and change each into a ((coordinate+1)%repeatLocation).

The final version of the texture shader that generates noise that loops at a specific location is as follows:

Noise + Real Numbers + Imaginary Numbers == ???

So, the second trick: the texture actually needed to contain two values (R and G channels), to act as real and imaginary parts. Very simple, I added a base parameter (in the code above) so that I could offset into a different 8x8x8 cube of noise. I drop a different 8x8x8 noise into the G channel.

Finally! We have a texture with 8x8x8 noise. But 8-cubed noise sucks, because it’s ridiculously repetative. That’s where that weird imaginary part comes into play. You sample the 8-cube volume again, but at 9x scale (so it’s lower frequency). You then use the (real component of) high-frequency as an angle (scaled by 2pi) to do a quaternion rotation on the low-frequency noise.

The gist is that each unit cube cell has a randomly-placed point in it. for each point being evaluated by the shader, you find the distance to the nearest point (a value called “F1″), and the distance to the next-nearest (“F2″), etc (to as many as you care about – though anything past F4 starts to look similar and uninteresting). Using linear combinations of these distances gives interesting results:

Left: F1 Right: F2
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Left: F2-F1 Right: (F1+F2)/2
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Something cool to do, also, is to use Manhattan distance instead of standard Euclidian distance to calculate the distance. You end up with much more angular results. Here are the same 4 calculations, using manhattan distance:

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Considering that a few levels of my current project will take place in a metallic fortress, this will especially come in handy.

So, what can you do with these?

I, predictably, have made a few test textures:

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Also, it still looks pretty cool if you use fBm on it. For instance:

4 octaves of F1 Worley noise

But I hear you asking “duz it wrok n 3deez, Drilian?!?!?!” Oh, I assure you it does!

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And now I hear you asking “Can u stop typing nau? I is tir0d of reedin.” (or alternately, “I is tir0d uv looking @ imagez sparsely scattered thru the text taht I dun feel liek reedin.”) To this, I say: Sure, but it worries me that you’re asking your questions in some form of lolcat.

The Trouble With Texcoords

The problem was, the edge-expanding algorithm I used was detecting way more edges than it needed to. Here’s an image of a normal map generated using this (old, bad) method (I made it render ONLY the skirts, for illustration):

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As you can see, way more edges through the UV charts were getting expanded than necessary. This was messing up the maps, because there were angles and edges where there didn’t need to be, and it was introducing artifacts, especially at lower mip levels.

The problem arose because each of those “extra” edges marked areas where the vertex positions were the same, but the texcoords were different. Since the original algorithm was using the vertex’s index as the identifying feature, each time there was a texcoord change meant that the indices for neighboring triangles were different, blah blah blah, you get the point.

UV: Vectors, Not Rays

Basically, the system was rewritten to glom together vertices with the same uv map coordinates, and treat them as one single vertex. All of those interior edges get discarded. Because a single “vertex” could actually be composed of multiple source vertices, the edge expanding code had to be modified to take that into account.

Here’s the old way again, followed by the NEW way (And then the new way completely filled in):

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As you can see, they’re now proper outlines (not outandsometimesinlines), and the actual outer areas are much cleaner.

I Don’t Think That Clown Is Healthy

So, here’s a new render (and its diffuse map). I modified the concrete because I was sick of all of my pictures being grayscale, so here’s my artist’s rendition of “Gray Chair That A Clown Puked Onto”:

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That’s all! I’m going to release the code that I’m using for all of this, but I want to clean it up just a bit, and add variable gutter width support (instead of the lame hardcoded way that I have it now).

I took it easy today, so I was barely near the computer, but I did make some awesome progress.

Last night, I was able to finally get a prototype of my texture caching setup going.

Diffusing the Procedural Situation Using Bad Puns

Right now, it’s a command-line tool that does the following:

Loads up a mesh and UV atlases it to get unique texture coordinates for the entire mesh (similar to what you’d do for lightmapping

Loads a D3DX effect

Renders the mesh into the a render target, using the UV atlas texcoords as position, using the actual model’s position/normal as shader inputs to generate the noise

Writes both the UV atlased mesh and the rendered texture to file

Simple enough. What I ended up with was as follows:

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Not bad, but for two things:

No normal mapping (per-vertex normals only)

Cracks along the seams of the UV maps.

Both are solvable problems, and I opted to tackle the normal mapping first.

Returning to Normalcy

How does one generate a normal map with a procedural function?

In my case, I have the procedural function not only generate a color but a height. Generating three heights in close proximity (using (pos), (pos+tangent*scaler), (pos+bitangent*scaler)) gives me two edges which I can take the cross-product of to get a pixel normal map. Adding this gave me some better shading (but didn’t fix the cracks):

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The normal map generated is in object space (though it could easily be in world space, assuming a static object). This simplifies the lighting code (I simply transform the light position by the inverse world matrix before passing it to the shader) and eliminates the need for tangent and bitangent (yes, bitangent, not “binormal”) vectors.

Cracks are Unappealing on Plumbers AND Procedurally-Textured Models

Finally, it was time to solve the cracking problem. I decided to solve it by using skirts around the edges of the UV map sections. Essentially, they’re degenerate textures in the actual mesh (the positions are the same), but the UV coordinates are expanded to fill in some of the gapping.

Basically:

Use your favorite method to get a list of edges that are only used once

Use these edges to generate “UV normals” for each vertex (which has two edges, one leading in and one leading out), which are basically ( perpendicular[(edge+edge2)/2] ).

duplicate each vertex, move its UV coordinate some distance along this uv normal

Create new strips of indices, using the old and new

render these into the UV map first, before rendering the standard data

This basically puffs out each procedurally-generated area, as you can (maybe) see here (Easier to see at full size):

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Thus, when the UV coordinates along the edges of these areas either go out of bounds or blend with the no-man’s-land around the texture, it blends with data that’s very close to what it’s near, hiding the cracks.

The result:

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And that’s “all” there is to it!

The UV atlasifying and skirt generation will be a pre-process, so all of the vertex (mesh) data will be ready for immediate rendering into the texture after load.

I needed a quick test to make sure that the noise textures work well in 3D, since that’s their intended use, so I decided to run them on some chairs.

A few things to note:

These aren’t currently being written to texture first (which is the ultimate idea) so the chairs in the background have a certain amount of…sparkle.

Also, this means that this is SLOW. This scene brought my 8800GTX to its little silicon knees. The concrete shader is 1906 instructions (way over the sm3 guaranteed min spec of 512), 306 texture and 1600 arithmetic, so it’s a bit…intense.

The lighting looks a little weird. I’m not sure if it’s an artifact or if it’s right and I’m just imagining things, but there you go.

This’ll be a short update. I came up with a better pavement texture, and, while trying for the stones, came up with a nice method of star generation, so I refined that as well. Hooray for happy accidents!

The stars one really looks best zoomed in (the thumbnail looks kinda lame), but I like them both!

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All 100% pixel-shader generated. Both of these use pure improved perlin noise modifications to generate their look…no custom patterns like the brick and tile textures from earlier.

If you want to play around with the generator, the binary, code, and shaders are in a zip in the previous post. Have at it and let me know if you make anything awesome!

Procedural Textures

As part of the framework for the game I am currently writing, I’m going to have as much texture data as possible be procedural and cached in on the fly. There are a few reasons for this choice (many of which should be obvious):

Less disk usage – very useful if I hit my target of, oh, say, a certain game console

Non-repeating textures – textures don’t have to tile. I can keep caching in new ones.

Seriously, I suck at texture art – This way, the computer does it for me!

I’m still working on the method, but here are a few examples:

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These are all generated on-GPU, using ps_3_0 shaders. The noise implementation comes straight (thank you, copy-and-paste) from GPU Gems 2, which is an awesome book.

The idea is that objects (especially static world objects) will have unwrapped UV coordinates (like you’d use for lightmaps). To generate the textures onto the objects, I’ll do the following:

Create a texture that is the requisite size (or pull it out of a pool, which is more likely

Render the objects into the texture, using the UV coordinates as the position (scaled from [0,1] to [-1,1] of course).

Pass the position and/or normal to the pixel shader, use it to generate the texture data

Repeat for as many textures as the object needs (some combination of diffuse color, normal, height, glossiness, etc).

Should be pretty easy. Obviously, there are some patterns that are ridiculously difficult or even maybe impossible to generate efficiently on the GPU, so I’ll probably still use some pre-made texturemaps. But as much as I possibly can do on the GPU, I will. The main gotcha will be keeping the amount of texture info that needs to be generated to a minimum, so there aren’t any render stalls. That’s more of a level design/art problem though (which, because this is being developed lone-wolf, is also my problem).

If you want to see the shaders I’ve used and the code that I used, here is my sample app (with full source):

The source is ridiculously uncommented because I coded it over the span of maybe 3 hours as a quick prototype, and the shaders are, I’m sure, nowhere near efficient. Also, they don’t handle negative values very well, which is why many of them add 100 to the coordinates (HACKHACKHACK).

Enjoy! And if you make any awesome textures with it, please let me know